And, apophenia might make you more susceptible to what researchers call ‘pseudo-profound bullshit’: meaningless statements designed to appear profound. Timothy Bainbridge, a postdoc at the University of Melbourne, gives an example: ‘Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.’ It’s a syntactically correct but vague and ultimately meaningless sentence. Bainbridge considers belief in pseudo-profound bullshit a particular instance of apophenia. To find it significant, one has to perceive a pattern in something that is actually made of fluff, and at the same time lack the ability to notice that it is actually not meaningful.
When the human tendency to detect patterns goes too far